Awards season is upon us and soon all of Hollywood will gather to celebrate its most talented actors and actresses, as determined by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Who will win the Oscar?

While this question is being volleyed about and fiercely debated among Internet pundits and armchair critics, the nominees themselves wait anxiously, knowing that receiving the coveted Academy Award would most likely translate into significant and tangible benefits for them in the form of professional prestige, better opportunities, and increased compensation. Adding to the suspense is the fact that the decision about who will receive an Oscar is left entirely to the arbitrary whims and subjective interpretations of the Academy’s members, with only the representations of a couple of accountants donned in Armani tuxedos to authenticate the legitimacy of the process.

I keep coming back to books about baseball, but they’re just too valuable in terms of personnel management. A baseball manager (and his colleagues in the team office) function so much like an HR department. They have to pick the best roster and field the best lineup for the opponent each night. They have to fit payroll in a budget and make tough roster decisions. And, while their forebears in the past managed off instinct, modern baseball executives employ stats and other metrics to see which players are worth their salaries and their position in the lineup. That brings us to this installment’s book, Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball by George Will. Will, of course, is best known for his syndicated political columns but at heart he is a baseball fanatic. Men at Work devoted special attention to Tony LaRussa (a law school graduate in his own right), at that time the manager for the Oakland A’s. Twenty-five years ago, the A’s were an American League juggernaut that featured a marquee roster with the likes of Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Dave Parker, and Dave Stewart. Will was, of course, impressed with the talent walking around LaRussa’s clubhouse, but he seemed most fascinated with the manager’s command of and use of statistics to arrange his fielders, select pitches, and basically guide most of his decisions. In that era, LaRussa kept enormous binders with pitch charts, statistics of players in particular situations, and any number of other possibilities. He consulted the information constantly throughout each game, and his staff updated the information regularly. The point here is that while most managers were making decisions based on feel or instinct, LaRussa was making them based on data and history. Did Carney Lansford tend to hit this pitcher mainly to left field? If so, then Tony Phillips probably needs to have a bigger lead at second to give him a better chance to score on a single. Does this pitcher stay wild on a 2-1 count? If so, maybe this isn’t the time to put on the hit-and-run. Personnel management can take a page from this book. While courts still do approve of subjective evaluations if employed in the right way, the best practice to defend claims is to be sure that cold, hard facts guide your decisions as much as possible. Has one of your salespeople complained that some unlawful reason led to their exclusion from a key sales pitch? If so, you’re in a much better position if you can show them that they’ve not been successful with this prospective client’s industry in the past. Numbers and data, used well, are your friends. So, ask yourself this question: are you hiring and fielding a team because you think they’re the best ones to compete in the market, or do you know? It’s never 100%; after all, LaRussa didn’t come out on top every year. But he did enter the Hall of Fame with three World Series rings.

Lately, have you felt feverish, light-headed, even giddy? Well then you must have Oscar fever. The stars! The gowns! The teeth! My god, those blinding white teeth! For you, March 2, 2014, was a night of luxury, glamour, and take-out noodles because NO WAY you were cooking for the family and risk missing J-Law stumble over something walking down the red carpet. Adorbs!

I have a complicated relationship with thick biographies. Intellectually, I know I should sit there and wade my way through the thick prose devoted to men and women of great consequence. In a way, it’s like broccoli: “Go on, eat it – it’ll be good for you, and what do you mean, ‘I’m not hungry’?” Quick fiction is so much more, well … fun. I didn’t have to fight that internal dialogue when I read Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs. I’ve been an Apple consumer for years: My folks bought an Apple II-E in the early ’80s and it stuck with us through thick and thin for the next 15 years. I’m writing this column on a MacBook. Apple fandom, however, is no key to appreciating Isaacson’s masterful treatment of Steve Jobs. Jobs, as you almost certainly know, was a brilliant, complicated, interesting, and often horrifying figure. His polymath and autodidactic approach to life guarantees that just about anyone can take a nugget of something from his biography, and personnel managers are no different. read more…

No discussion of the film Horrible Bosses is complete without covering Kevin Spacey’s character, David Harken. Although he is arguably the most intimidating and even frightening of the three horrible bosses (two of which I covered in earlier posts, #1 and #2), his workplace conduct gives rise to the lowest litigation value from an employment law perspective. Unfortunately for Harken, his jealousy combined with his unhealthy marriage ultimately lead him to a life of violent crime outside the office and his final downfall. For the purposes of this blog entry, we will focus on Harken’s workplace conduct and leave his more colorful personal life for your enjoyment at home with a tub of popcorn.

In the film, Nick Hendricks (played by Jason Bateman) has good reason to detest Harken. After dangling a possible promotion in front of Hendricks and watching Hendricks work tirelessly to meet Harken’s extremely high (and often inconsistent) expectations , Harken proceeds to award the promotion to . . . himself. He then commences construction on an even larger office for himself. Hendricks is understandably upset about this strange turn of events. Sadly for Hendricks, “unfair” and even “bizarre” do not equate to “unlawful.” In addition, case law has clearly established that federal employment laws aren’t general civility codes for the American workplace.